Trade unions have had LGBT+ members for as long as they have existed. But the first days of modern LGBT+ trade unionism can be traced to 1972, to the establishment of gay and lesbian worker branches of the National and Local Government Officers’ Association, or NALGO, which would later go on to form part of UNISON in 1993. By 1976, these pioneering gay and lesbian workers had secured the adoption of a gay- and lesbian-inclusive policy position by the NALGO union as a whole, and published a newsletter called NALGAY.
This had practical as well as political implications. In 1976, members of the union took industrial action against Tower Hamlets Council after it dismissed a gay employee who was a social worker on the grounds of sexuality: he was, according to his employers, a ‘jeopardy to the community’. It was only nine years since homosexuality had been decriminalised in England and Wales, and the press was hostile—the Daily Telegraph ran an editorial asking if gay men ‘are fit to be social workers’—but the workers stood firm and won. Ian Davies, the worker, was reinstated. Similar campaigns were run by other unions to reinstate sacked workers, including Jamie Dunbar, a COHSE member and hospital porter fired for wearing a pride badge at work.
